March 2017
Monthly Archive
Fri 3 Mar 2017
FIRST YOU READ, THEN YOU WRITE
by Francis M. Nevins
Considering that I was an inch from death last month, perhaps a March column is asking too much of myself. We shall see. I suspect this one is going to be a bit skimpy.

On the 6th of February, at age 91, Alec McCowen died. He was one of the most revered English actors, having appeared in several Shakespeare productions, including ROMEO AND JULIET and KING LEAR, and a number of 20th-century classics like PYGMALION and EQUUS.
He also had roles in 30-odd movies, of which the best known is probably FRENZY (1972). Who can forget his performance in that last of Hitchcock’s great films? As the harried Scotland Yard inspector, a bangers-and-mash man if ever there was one, who comes home after a hard day trying to track down a serial rapist and killer only to find his wife (Vivien Merchant) getting ready to serve him a tasty dinner of sautéed lovebirds’ wings or something of the sort, he’s unforgettable.
The last time I saw FRENZY was when it came out 45 years ago, but it’s still green in my memory. Shot in London, it tells the story of down-and-out ex-RAF pilot Richard Blaney (Jon Finch), who becomes the prime suspect in a series of brutal rape-murders and goes on the run. The real criminal is Robert Rusk (Barry Foster), a Covent Garden fruit-and-vegetable merchant as was Hitchcock’s father, and much of the location shooting takes place in the neighborhood the director knew as a boy.

For a time the fugitive Blaney is protected by fellow RAF veterans — which would have made more sense if the picture’s events had taken place immediately after World War II, when the surviving Battle of Britain pilots were national heroes — but eventually he’s caught by Inspector Oxford (our man McCowen) and locked up. Knowing by then that Rusk is the real murderer, Blaney escapes and sets out for revenge.
I’d be a toad if I gave away more of the plot, which is summarized on several websites devoted to the picture. Among all the Hitchcock films after PSYCHO (1960), FRENZY stands out as by far the most suspenseful.

So far this is indeed a mini-column, but a recent phone conversation with a friend who teaches literature and film allows me to extend it. For a forthcoming book on film noir, my friend has agreed to write a chapter on the French contributions to the genre during the Nazi occupation. This is a subject on which I’m woefully ignorant but I do know that one of the titles that falls within this category is LES INCONNUS DANS LA MAISON (1941), which was based on Georges Simenon’s 1940 novel of the same name, translated into English after the war as STRANGERS IN THE HOUSE (1954).
In both novel and film the main character is Hector Loursat, a gross and unkempt lawyer — his bearishness signaled, at least for those who know a little French, by his name — who has retreated into an alcoholic shell after his wife left him. When a small-time gangster is discovered murdered in the huge Loursat house, our protagonist finds himself forced to defend his daughter’s lover, who’s accused of the crime.

Unusually for Simenon, a good bit of the novel takes place in court, and the legal procedure will cause readers familiar with the English or American systems to throw up their hands more than once. (For example, the defense counsel cannot question witnesses directly but must ask the judge to repeat each question to whoever is on the stand.) Anyone who expects the kind of forensic fireworks associated with Perry Mason novels is likely to find the book frustrating, but on its own terms it’s widely considered one of the best of Simenon’s stand-alone crime novels and I would have to agree with this verdict.
How close the Occupation-era movie came to its source is unclear, although from what I’ve found on the Web there seem to be considerable differences. The film climaxes with a passionate speech by Loursat (Raimu), indicting the older generation for the peccadilloes of the young, which has no counterpart in Simenon. (This speech can be accessed on YouTube, but it’s in French.) To discover any other differences I’ll have to wait for my friend’s essay.

To complete my account of Simenon’s novel [WARNING] I have no choice but to reveal the real killer. It turns out to be a young delinquent called Justin Luska, whose motivation for the crime is clear as mud. He’s described as the “son of a tradesman,…[who] because of his red hair, his name, his real first name, Ephraim, the Eastern origin of his father, was the object of ridicule of his schoolmates….People said that he smelled, like his father’s shop….â€
When the father enters the courtroom late in the proceedings, Simenon tells us that he looked like “a man belonging to that race of humans you find sleeping in the corridors of night trains, sitting patiently in police stations, trying desperately to explain themselves in an impossible language, the sort that is always questioned at frontiers….[D]idn’t the fact that his coat smelled bad cause others to step aside?….He was dark and oily, almost flabby….â€

The word Jew is never mentioned, at least not in the English translation that postdates WWII and the Holocaust, but the Luskas père et fils remind us irresistibly of those scruffy East European Jews who to Simenon’s discredit pockmark his novels of the 1930s.
If they are clearly identified as Jews in the original French, this wouldn’t be the first time a translator refused to be true to Simenon’s text. As I discussed in an earlier column, Anthony Boucher did precisely the same thing when during the war years he translated a Simenon short story with a Jewish villain for EQMM. Sometimes it’s better to be unfaithful. Indeed, when the 1941 movie was re-released after the war, the soundtrack was tinkered with so that Luska’s first name morphs from Ephraim to the clearly un-Jewish Amédée. In the France of the immediate postwar years, even the appearance of anti-Semitism was taboo.
Ah! Now we have a column of respectable dimensions. Perhaps I’ll do better, or at least longer, next month.
Fri 3 Mar 2017
Posted by Steve under
Reviews[5] Comments
REVIEWED BY BARRY GARDNER:
MICHAEL CONNELLY – The Black Ice. Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch #2. Little Brown & Co, hardcover, 1993. St. Martin’s Press, paperback, 1994. Reprinted many times since.

The first novel about LAPD Detective and ex-Nam tunnel rat, Harry Bosch, The Black Echo, got a rousing reception, and is up for a First Novel Edgar. I won’t be surprised if it wins, and among the final nominees it probably should.
Harry has been booted out of homicide and sent to the pits, i.e., Hollywood, because of his last case. As the book opens he is on call Christmas night, and overhears a scrap of conversation on his scanner that something’s going down he should have been called on.
Turns out that the something is the apparent suicide of an officer who has been under a cloud of suspicioun, and the Department intends to cover it up quickly and thoroughly. Well, of course this pisses Harry off to no end, and when a couple of other cases seem to be connected, he begins to loft garbage lids and make himself even more unpopular than usual.
As I said about the first Bosch, this really isn’t a cop novel. It’s a lone wolf hero book, and has much more the flavor of a hardboiled private eye story than a police novel. Connelly is an excellent writer, and anyone áºho likes Clint Eastwood has got to love Harry Bosch.
Characterization is very good throughout,and the prose is outstanding. As with Connelly’s first, I’m not sure I thought the ending was completely credible; but as also with the first, it didn’t keep me from enjoying it. Connelly’s got another winner.
— Reprinted from Ah Sweet Mysteries #6, March 1993.
UPDATE: Barry was correct. The Black Echo did win the Edgar, just as he predicted. Number 22 in the Harry Bosch series, Two Kinds of Truth, will be published in 2017.
Thu 2 Mar 2017
Posted by Steve under
Reviews[8] Comments

JOHN SLADEK – Black Aura. Walker, US, hardcover, 1979; paperback, 1983. First edition: Jonathan Cape, UK, hardcover, 1974.
Thackeray Phin, two years an Englishman and bemoaning his lack of a career as an amateur detective, decides to undertake an investigation on his own into the psychic medium business. His ensuing encounter with the Aetheric Mandala Society also, but not unexpectedly, brings him into another murder case at last.
A sense of humor is both a requirement and the redeeming virtue here. Several deft jabs at the conventional murder mystery land none too gently. Several disappearances from locked rooms and one faulty attempt at levitation enter into the spirit of the occasion.
The closing explanations are obviously written by an expert choreographer of such matters — the master, John Dickson Carr himself, would be well pleased — but do be warned that the characters are otherwise strictly of the stick figure variety.
— Reprinted from The MYSTERY FANcier, Vol. 4, No. 2, March-April 1980 (very slightly revised).
Bibliographic Notes: A second and final case (**) for Thackeray Phin was Invisible Green, published in this country by Walker, also in 1979. John Sladek himself was primarily known as a science fiction writer.
(**) Not quite so. See the comments for information about two cases that Phin solved in short story form.
Thu 2 Mar 2017
REVIEWED BY JONATHAN LEWIS:
T-BIRD GANG. The Filmgroup, 1959. John Brinkley, Ed(win) Nelson, Tony Miller, Pat George, Coleman Francis, Nola Thorp. Music: Shelly Manne. Director: Richard Harbinger.

You know the old adage about going to see a fight and having a hockey game break out? That’s what I thought of when watching T-Bird Gang, a Roger Corman-produced programmer that is significantly better, in both style and substance, than it has any natural right to be.
The reason for this is that the movie occasionally makes you feel as if you’re at a jazz concert and somehow a crime film broke out. I joke. But the movie’s at times overwhelming score by West Coast jazz drummer Shelly Manne lends the proceedings a frantic, hip energy that makes what would have been an ordinary crime film into something a bit more memorable. It definitely kept me watching and tapping along.

The plot isn’t all that inventive. Nor is it particularly difficult to follow. Future television star Ed Nelson (billed here as Edwin Nelson) portrays Alex Hendricks, the son of a warehouse night watchman gunned down in the line of duty. Alex takes it upon himself to avenge his father’s death and ingratiates himself into the good graces of the local criminal gang responsible for the crime. After Alex lands in police custody, he is given a choice. Give up his vigilantism and help the police to bring down the gang or go to jail.
Alex chooses the former option and assists Captain Prell (Coleman Francis) in the police department’s efforts to nab the unsavory criminal element plaguing the local community. Did I mention that the head honcho in the outfit drives a white T-Bird? But don’t let the car or the lobby cards fool you, this really is more a gritty crime film than it is a juvenile delinquent film.
Wed 1 Mar 2017
Posted by Steve under
Reviews[35] Comments

ROSS MACDONALD – The Chill. Lew Archer # 11. Alfred A. Knopf, hardcover, 1963. Paperback reprints include: Bantam F2913, 1965; Warner, July 1990; Vintage Crime/Black Lizard, 1996.
Ross Macdonald is considered one of the finest writers of private eye fiction of all time, and rightly so. The Chill is both tightly plotted and smoothly laid out for the reader, who sees the story through one set of eyes, those of private eye Lew Archer only. One might wish that he would convey everything he thinks to the reader, but for better or worse, he does not.
This leaves it up to the reader to interpret people and events at the same time Archer does, or decide to wait until the end, when, at least in The Chill, there is a seismic shift at work, one that once it has clicked into place, will make sudden sense out of what till then had been a huge and unmanageable set of connected coincidences. This is definitely not the case. Macdonald knew exactly what he was doing when he wrote this book, every inch of the way.

Which begins with Archer being hired by a distraught young man to find his newlywed wife, who seems to have run out on him before their marriage has even been consummated. That’s the easy part. Before locating her, no more than a simple day’s work, Archer runs across several other people who had recently come in contact with her in one way or another, including several academics, one of whom briefly toys with hiring him herself; a man who may or may not be the girl’s father; plus a large group of other miscellaneous lovers, wives and mothers, some incidental, most not, all sharply described and delineated.

One really does need a scorecard to read this densely written and populated book, as the story only escalates from there. Once found, the missing woman then comes very close to being booked for murder. Archer does not think she did it, and not wishing to give up on the case, he needs to find another client, and soon, which luckily he manages to do, and very quickly.
The case takes him geographically from a small town on the California coast to Chicago and Reno and back to Pacific Point before it is done, and chronologically back 20 years or more, with several murders having occurred along the way, some of them “solved,” but perhaps not all.
One of the themes of the book, to me, is one of Zeno’s ancient Grecian paradoxes, which as recounted by Aristotle, goes something like this:
“In a race, the quickest runner can never overtake the slowest, since the pursuer must first reach the point whence the pursued started, so that the slower must always hold a lead.”
Which in everyday language, I take to mean: “No matter how fast you go, you’ll never get there.” Sounds like pure noir to me.
« Previous Page